May 02, 2016

Here's another comment from the Crooked Timber site post supposedly about this orchestrated campaign against the Labour leadership and left. This comment was from Corey Robin:

This is from Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews. Volume I: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939. Friedlander, along with Yehuda Bauer, is considered the dean of Holocaust historians.

In addition, the material difficulty of emigrating was considerable, especially in a period of economic uncertainty; it entailed an immediate and heavy material loss….In one instance only were the economic conditions of emigration somewhat facilitated. Not only did the regime encourage Zionist activities on the territory of the Reich, but concrete economic measures were taken to ease the departure of the Jews for Palestine. The so-called Haavarah (Hebrew: Transfer) Agreement, concluded on August 27, 1933, between the German Ministry of the Economy and Zionist representatives from Germany and Palestine, allowed Jewish emigrants indirect transfer of part of their assets and facilitated exports of goods from Nazi Germany to Palestine. As a result, some one hundred million Riechsmarks were transferred to Palestine, and most of the sixty thousand Germany Jews who arrived in that country during 1933-39 could thereby ensure a minimal basis for their material existence.
…
…About Zionism itself, moreover, Nazi ideology and Nazi policies were divided from the outset: while favoring, like all other European extreme anti-Semites, Zionism as a means of enticing the Jews to leave Europe, they also considered the Zionist organization established in Basel in 1987 as a key element of the Jewish world conspiracy….
…
Even before the conclusion of the Haavarah Agreement, such “cooperation” [between the Nazis and the Zionists] took bizarre forms. Thus, in early 1933, Baron Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein, a man who a few years later was to become chief of the Jewish section of the SD (the Sicherheitsdienst, or security service, the SS intelligence branch headed by Reinhard Heydrich), was invited along with his wife to tour Palestine and write a series of articles for Goebbels’s Der Angriff . And so it was that the Mildensteins, accompanied by Kurt Tuchler, a leading member of the Berlin Zionist Organization, and his wife, visited Jewish settlements in Eretz Israel. The highly positive articles, entitled “A Nazi Visits Palestine,” were duly published, and, to mark the occasion, a special medallion cast, with a swastika on one side and a Star of David on the other.
…
Zionist hopes were moderated by practical worries about excessive numbers of immigrants. “In order that the immigration not flood the existing settlement in Palestine like lava,” Ruppin declared at the Zionist Congress held in Prague in the summer of 1933, “it must be proportionate to a certain percentage of that settlement.” This remained the policy for several years to come, and well after the passage of the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws, both the German Zionists and the leader of the Yishuv were still envisaging an annual rate of fifteen to twenty thousand German-Jewish emigrants, extending over a period of twenty to thirty years.

Later in the book, Friedlander talks about a growing move in the mid to late 1930s against the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine among certain sectors of the Nazi Foreign Ministry. This led to increasing opposition to that Haavarah agreement, which was the Nazi policy for facilitating Jewish emigration to Palestine. But this is what Friedlander has to say about that growing opposition to the Haavarah agreement:

But no one [in the Nazi foreign ministry] dared to take any concrete measures against the agreement, as Hitler had not yet expressed his viewpoint. His decision announced at the end of January 1938, clearly implied maintenance of the Haavarah: Further Jewish emigration [to Palestine] by all possible means . The bureaucracy was left with only one choice: Comply. And so it did.

Lots of Zionists are quick to point out that Hitler said he didn't like Zionists in Mein Kampf but the above excerpt shows that he seems to have changed his mind some time between the 1925 publication of Hitler's book and Ha'avara in 1933.

It's stuff like this that is going to have the Zionists biting off more than they can chew especially if they try to take on Ken Livingstone.